Many of us use our iPads and iPhones for photos on the go, from quick snapshots for social media to in-depth professional projects.
Whatever your chosen tools and purpose, there's a fair chance the pictures you make with your mobile device have some unwanted noise. Noise is the price we pay for tiny, high-resolution sensors that fit in a pocket. Fortunately, you don't have to live with smartphone camera noise.

In this tutorial you'll learn how to use the iOS app Noiseware from Imagenomic. We'll also see how it stands up to its Photoshop plugin counterpart.

Use With Your In-Device Camera

Daylight Pictures

If you’re using your phone or pad to snap away during the
day, chances are they won’t be excessively noisy. Sometimes though, if you’re using an
older model (which I am, iPad 2) then the cameras aren’t always great. Let’s
see what Noiseware can do about that.

Biscuit bunny is going to be my daylight example

Meet Biscuit, he’s our model for this example photo. This was taken with
the standard settings on my iPad 2 camera, out of doors and out of direct
sunlight but still with lots of light available.

The App

When you open up the app, this is the interface you’re met with:

Noiseware's noise removal app interface

Nice and simple: you have the option to open up a picture
from one of your album folders or directly access the camera and take a new
picture. In the top right you have the option to save your image and in the
bottom left are the noise reduction filters.

The custom filter options gives you more control over your noise reduction

Back to Biscuit. As I mentioned, this isn’t a particularly
noisy image so I went straight to custom where you can also increase the exposure.
Exposure gives an all-round boost as you’d expect, so great for the shadows but
further blows out the already over exposed highlights.

A great feature of the app is that you can press on your photo
at any time to see the original, which really helps when you’re making any
subtle changes. On clicking this I could see it was a little soft but not too
horrific. Let’s move on to something a little more testing.

Low Light Pictures

Again using the iPad 2 camera, I took this:

A picture in low light resulted in a lot of noise

You can see my light source from the right; I tried it even
darker but the camera just couldn’t handle it. As you can see, this is a noisy picture
(and nowhere near as cute as Biscuit). Let’s try the four pre-sets:

Default

The default setting

This is the default setting. A lot of the noise has been
removed but I’ve been left with considerable softening (note the ‘Underwood’
writing) and also some artefacting, which you can see in the zoomed in example I’ve
included in the bottom right.

Weak

Weak noise removal setting

A weak setting for images that aren’t very noisy. My example
doesn’t quite fit that and you can see there’s still considerable noise left
but also there isn’t too much softening either.

Strong

Strong noise removal

Arguably this is the one that should be most suited to my
example: strong noise removal. It certainly does the job. The background looks
much smoother, but again you can see softening and some anomalies around edges
demonstrated in the bottom right.

Night

Night shot pre-set

Night shot doesn’t seem appropriate, but actually, with a low-light scenario why not give it a try? I think with this setting you can certainly see an improvement
in the edges and there’s a less trade off with softening. Having said that,
it’s still pretty noisy! Certainly it’s improved from the original, though.

In this example I didn’t find using the custom filter option significantly different from the results of
the pre-sets so I haven't included it.

Professional Image Editing

In practice it's not only images from our tablets or phones that we have to work with on the devices. For comparison, it's only fair to give this a test with a ‘proper’
image rather than just with my iPad's camera.

I added noise to this image to test it on the app

To test, I added some noise to this image in Photoshop, put
it onto my pad and opened it up in the app:

Default

Default noise removal does the job but leaves the image a bit flat

The default noise removal filter actually does a pretty good
job! The softening isn’t horrific and you can see a big improvement in the sky
and sea.

Strong

Strong noise removal is quite soft, especially on the wood to the right

I ran it through the strongest setting so that we could see the ‘worst
case’ scenario. It is pretty soft if you look at the wood closest to us on the
right. Because we have a better quality image to start, however, there’s none of the weird
artefacting where it’s smoothed the noise.

Custom

Custom noise removal is more flexible and can bring back some contrast through exposure settings

I felt the pre-sets dulled the image a little so I tried the custom filter. You can see this has an Excessive Noise option which I have set to on. The option to raise the exposure a little brought back some of the contrast I felt was lost with the other filters and being able to control how strong the filter is with the top slider means you can weigh up noise reduction versus the softening trade off.

App Versus the Photoshop Plugin

Bet you couldn’t tell which was which, right? Well they are
small images to be fair but you can take my word for it when I tell you there’s
little difference in the two when viewed at full size. If you start to zoom in
then you might see more softening with the app version, which by the way, is
the one on the right.

Conclusion

I’m not a fan of editing on a mobile device, period. I
prefer to have a big screen and more flexibility than a pad allows; plus I have
clumsy fingers. Needs must, though, and many photographers find editing apps
invaluable when on the move.

The App is Great For:

Noise removal with less flexibility: you get
what you get and that depends on initial image quality.

Boosting your exposure (if needed) whilst
removing noise.

Giving you the ability to remove noise quickly
and easily–literally at the touch of a button.

Seeing a before and after as you edit.

When It’s Not So Great:

Using your in device camera if the camera is
poor. To be fair, this is not a fault of the app, but still something to be
considered.

If you want flexibility in editing your images, such
as edge softening/sharpening or targeting just luma noise for example.

I’d certainly say the Noiseware app is worth the £2.99 it currently
sells for and if you’re importing a high quality image, then at full view, it
will do just as good a job as the PS plugin when you’re on the go and time is
short.

If you’re not constrained by time, I’d say opt for one of the
software plugin versions; you get a larger choice of pre-sets and flexibility
within those pre-sets so that you’re not compromising your image beyond what
you’re comfortable with.